BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Americans Love a Conspiracy, but Why?

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: December 18, 2001

ENEMIES WITHIN

The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America

By Robert Alan Goldberg

Illustrated. 354 pages. Yale University Press. $29.95.

I'll never forget how I first learned that Gene Kahn killed Kennedy. It was a Saturday in the summer of 1993. In Massachusetts no less. I was interrogating a fidgety informer who spun a vivid account -- delivered to him, he explained, by a swarthy foreigner -- of an intricate assassination conspiracy and an ensemble cast that boasted mob hit men, Cuban émigrés and Marilyn Monroe. Only now can it be told: the informer was our 11-year-old son.

The interrogation took place at his summer camp on parents weekend. The foreign contact was his Australian counselor, whose own source for the plot was a dog-eared paperback called ''Double Cross.'' But who was Gene Kahn? Not until a few hours later, when we had driven halfway home, did I realize that a surfeit of syllables and an Aussie accent had conspired to mangle the culprit's name. Gene Kahn didn't kill President John F. Kennedy. Sam Giancana did. Or did he kill Marilyn Monroe?

It has been said that in a world of cause and effect, coincidence is always suspect. Previous books have explored the psychological motives that drive people to perpetrate or perpetuate sinister plot lines to rationalize extraordinary events. In ''Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America'' Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah, takes a different tack. He tries to identify the historical and social undercurrents that have driven seemingly sane Americans to attribute such events to nefarious conspiracies instead of embracing equally or more plausible -- if also more mundane -- causes like government arrogance, sloppiness and even coincidence.

Professor Goldberg dissects five contemporary plots, including the specter of Communist infiltration (borrowing his title from J. Edgar Hoover's handbook for red hunters, ''The Enemy Within''), the impending arrival of the Antichrist (which, he writes, ''has become as essential to repentance as faith in Jesus''), the roots of hostility between blacks and Jews, and several variations of the Kennedy assassination (at least some of which required few leaps of faith). Completing the quintet are the U.F.O. sightings and cover-ups that supposedly percolated up from accounts by ordinary people and became collectively known as Roswell. (The twisted plots-within-plots in television's ''X-Files'' produced this epiphany: ''The U.S. military saw a good thing in '47 when the Roswell story broke. The more we deny it the more people believed it was true. Aliens had landed, a made-to-order cover story for generals looking to develop the national war chest.'')

Professor Goldberg sheds little new light on to what degree, if any, the purported plots are grounded in fact. But he pinpoints and then stitches together several intriguing common threads.

''Conspiracy'' is derived from Latin meaning to breathe together, and since the act of breathing by itself seems to all but suffice legally to justify a criminal conviction for conspiracy, it's not surprising how little it takes to stoke the popular imagination.

Why are conspiracy theories so credible? Invoking a litany of bunglings, half-truths and outright distortions that distinguished the government's original responses to U.F.O. sightings, the U-2 spy plane incident of 1960, Vietnam, Watergate, Ruby Ridge and Waco, conspiracists and countersubversives can claim that history is on their side.

Each player in the real or imagined plots -- the seekers of secrets and the keepers of secrets -- inevitably performs to character, provoking what Professor Goldberg explains is the requisite confrontation that conspiracism demands. Contradictions and consistency each are seized upon as evidence of Byzantine conspiracies that become as difficult to disprove as to prove. The establishment press dutifully parrots the government line. Ham-handed officials repress dissent and plant informers, feeding the siege mentality in which paranoid plots flourish.

These plots are also means to other ends. They galvanize believers. They enable anxious and powerless people to cope. Arguably, they even offer closure and a modicum of hope that whatever injustice was wrought by the conspiracy will be ameliorated, or at least won't be repeated, once the plot is finally exposed. They provide a moral counterpart to Newton's Law, reassuring a jittery public that major effects require major causes and are not the result of simple twists of fate or lone assassins. After all, the true skeptic believes that anything is possible.

Professor Goldberg credits -- or blames -- Hollywood as the great validator of conspiracy theories. The most influential historians, he concludes, are filmmakers.

That may be true up to a point; witness ''J. F. K.'' or ''Wag the Dog.'' But conspiracy theories also flourished well before they were popularized by the movies, and although films and the Internet can spread those theories wider and faster, the greatest impetuses are usually the government officials or other authority figures who suppress information or engage in cover-ups. Secrecy breeds rumor, Professor Goldberg writes, and it's no surprise that the creator of ''The X-Files'' came of age during Watergate. (It's also noteworthy that, as Professor Goldberg writes, conspiracies typically are a male preserve.)

Professor Goldberg occasionally indulges in jargon; plot imaging is a favorite phrase. But a larger shortcoming is the book's occasional failure to distinguish adequately between cause and effect in conspiracy theories. In a case I explored, the accused atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg may have been framed 50 years ago, their punishment was disproportionate to their conviction, and as we now know the chief witness against Ethel Rosenberg perjured himself. Still, none of that negates the overwhelming evidence that Julius Rosenberg himself was also guilty of a conspiracy: a conspiracy to commit espionage.

Conspiracism is an American tradition, Professor Goldberg writes, although only rarely, as in the 1850's and 1930's, do the conspirators seem even temporarily to have penetrated vital institutions. In that context his finger wagging over the emergence of a new nationalism of conspiracism seems a trifle alarmist. Conspiracy thinking has moved Americans beyond a healthy skepticism of authority, he writes. Lacking public confidence, core institutions become unstable and lose their ability to govern. The cancer of conspiracism has begun to metastasize. Without a new awareness of its character and quick intervention, countersubversion may overcome the body politic. Sounds to me like the makings of a conspiracy.